AGAIN, a plan simplistic in its brilliance, but brilliant it is.

Dell built a command and control center to monitor social situations relating to it or its competitors. That’s not a big deal in and of itself. What is a bigger deal is that Dell put a couple dozen people from all disciplines of the company outside of that control center to respond to or elevate/navigate things that someone should be paying attention to.

It hit me immediately. I use Twitter as a time saver. Not all do, as we know. Sure, I get bored and tell you about my new cowboy boots (bought some today, make me a good 2″ taller!), but I don’t expect anyone to care. I use Twitter to shorten my time to knowledge of things going down that I care about. It takes work, but I know if a “movement” is afoot much faster via Twitter than any other medium in my world. Good, bad, or ugly–it has become a sentiment indicator in my world. I know who’s in play, who’s in trouble, who’s got a product problem, and who just said something moronic faster than most. The trick is who you listen to and where.

I’m in the information business. So is Dell. So are you.

Dell figured this out. It isn’t just trying to force its view (don’t say anything bad about me or I’ll sue your ass!), but take the good, bad, and ugly–sort the wheat from the chaff, learn from it, and react. In almost real time. Apparently Michael was smart enough to figure out that this could be an invaluable time saver years ago and now it’s being mainstreamed philosophically throughout Dell. I’ll see him later on and find out if this is true. Then I’ll tweet about it!

I happened to be there right before it was announced today, so I got a sneak peak. It’s really impressive. What’s most impressive is that it is NOT used exclusively to cover up, shoot the naysayers, or food the world with retweets of “I love my new Inspiron!” (although they surely will remind us of that). I saw them scouring the social scene for “intelligence”–how the world is feeling about Dell or competitors–in almost real-time. It’s fascinating. Genius. It’s a competitive weapon. Dell will know things faster than those who don’t use the social world for intelligence gathering. Fact.

I’d rather know the facts, good or bad, faster rather than slower.

FYI, Michael (which is what I call him as we’re BFFs that follow each other on Twitter), is a year younger than I am and we both are married with four kids. So, other than the fact that he is a foot taller and worth $20B more than me, we’re pretty much twins.

P.S. Take note: you cannot succeed in attempting to do this if you “outsource” the responsibility to an agency. You have to commit your OWN people to act. You can have others/tools “listen,” but you have to commit your own people to respond and to act. If you don’t, you are full of shit and the world will know. You are wasting your money.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Steve Duplessie is the founder of and Senior Analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. Recognised worldwide as the leading independent authority on enterprise storage, Steve has also consistently been ranked as one of the most influential IT analysts. You can track Steve’s blog at http://www.thebiggertruth.com